Iranian defector tipped West about Syrian nuke plans

This article is about a week old but I didn't see anywhere on the TV or even anything in the blogosphere. A retired general from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards defected to the West back in 2007 and revealed a bombshell to the intelligence community. He asserted that Iran was financing a North Korean nuclear project in Syria. No one in the intelligence community knew about the nuclear project in Syria. Once Israel was informed the IAF took action and blew up the nuclear plant.

American Intelligence insists that Iran wasn't behind the financing of the nuclear project in Syria but do you really think that Syria could have proceeded without Tehran's approval? Wherever you look with regards to nuclear proliferation, you'll always see the usual suspects....Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and even China.AP

Ali Reza Asghari, a retired general in Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards and a former deputy defense minister, "changed sides" in February 2007 and provided considerable information to the West on Iran's own nuclear program, Ruehle said in his article in the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung.

"The biggest surprise, however, was his assertion that Iran was financing a secret nuclear project of Syria and North Korea," he said. "No one in the American intelligence scene had heard anything of it. And the Israelis who were immediately informed also were completely unaware."[...]

U.S. and Israeli intelligence had detected North Korean ship deliveries of construction supplies to Syria that started in 2002, and American satellites spotted the construction as early as 2003.

But they regarded the work as nothing unusual, in part because the Syrians had banned radio and telephones from the site and handled communications solely by messengers — "medieval but effective," Ruehle said.

Intensive investigation followed by U.S. and Israeli intelligence services until Israel sent a 12-man commando unit in two helicopters to the site in August 2007 to take photographs and soil samples, he said.

"The analysis was conclusive that it was a North Korean-type reactor," a gas graphite model, Ruehle said.

Other sources have suggested that the reactor might have been large enough to make about one nuclear weapon's worth of plutonium a year.